Dec 17, 2014

Profile of Atit Jain, Co - Founder, Gigstart.com

Atit Jain is one of the founders at Gigstart where he is primarily responsible for team and product building. His key focus areas are the demand side of the marketplace, exploring funding opportunities and strategy. However, as the platform is his own brainchild, he oversees almost every aspect of its functioning and growth. Being an academic achiever opened many doors for Atit’s professional growth.

He has a dual degree, a B.Sc in Electronics and Instrumentation and an M.Sc in Economics from the prestigious Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. After this he worked with one of the top global companies, JP Morgan and followed it with a successful stint as one of the core members of Applied Mobile Labs.

The idea to incubate Gigstart came to Atit while he was working with a curated content guide for the perfect weekends. It is here that he had to often handle queries regarding venue and artist bookings for private and social events. He realised how unorganised the market was and how it was dominated by certain event managers who charged unreasonable rates for their services. To streamline the process of finding the right performer, artist or service provider for any occasion, he built Gigstart and enlisted the support of his co-founder, Madhulika Pandey.

Atit firmly believes that the team of employees at Gigstart has been vital to its present-day success. Many of them are musicians and artists themselves which helps the platform to gain a nuanced approach towards operations. A significant achievement in his journey has been the fact that Gigstart is now empanelled with TV HomeShop 18 and provides them artists for all their live shows. In the future, Atit’s vision for Gigstart is to expand its horizons across the globe and to get many more artists and service providers across genres on board. An adventure enthusiast, Atit is a trained mountaineer, Sky diver and Paraglider. He also loves the adrenaline rush of activities like water skiing and white water rafting. He regards summiting 16,000 ft in Spiti Valley, jumping solo off the plane and flying for five hours as major milestones of his personal life.

About Gigstart.com

Gigstart is a marketplace that facilitates quick and transparent connections between entertainers and party planners. Incepted in December 2013 in New Delhi, the company leads artists, performers and other organisers to their potential clients. It also aims to serve the customer-side by enabling them to make informed choices through verified listings, meaningful reviews and ratings. The main objective of Gigstart is to wipe out numerous interceding channels involved in a conventional event booking process.

On the platform one can find anchors, stand-up comics, singers, dancers, make-up artists and photographers amongst others. Gigstart is a one-stop destination for planning a party or a mega event of any sort. Starting from providing various options, guiding party planners to the best-suited artists and connecting them, to concluding with payment services and contract formalities, it’s a unified platform that offers comprehensive solutions for all entertainment needs.

The founding team at Gigstart previously worked with a lifestyle guide where they planned out perfect weekends for patrons by reviewing restaurants, movies, suggesting quick weekend getaways etc. While handling queries regarding venue and artist bookings for private and social events, they realised that searching for the right artist, emcee, DJ or make-up artists could often end up being a wild goose chase. The market revealed itself to be highly unorganised and majorly dominated by event planners. Also the money that these middle parties charged as facilitation didn’t seem to justify the work they were doing. This inspired the beginning of Gigstart.

The concept of Gigstart plugged a much-needed gap in the Indian market and this was visible in the response that the platform received since its very inception. In the first month, three artists got work through Gigstart and now over 100 bookings are made every month through the platform. Till date, it has successfully organised 54 events with more than 85 artists getting hired thanks to its services. The website has been getting over 2,000 page views every week and at least 8-10 phone calls a day for queries.

The vision of the founders is to create a service sector based on transparency and credibility and streamline a database that ensures one superlative performer for every ceremony. They aim to be the world’s largest marketplace for entertainment services. In the next three months, they hope to have 10,000 service providers on board and envision fixing at least 500 gigs per month, without any query going otiose.